This chapter reveals the dependencies between a natural user interface (NUI) and knowledge technologies; discusses architecture, design, and code samples that integrate knowledge technologies into enterprise applications; and gives the keys to a new breed of software— “Softology,” a mix of software and ontological engineering.

We talked about NUIs in the previous chapter and agreed that they are not a trivial pursuit. We discussed at length a small part of an NUI—current speech technologies—and ended up with the conclusion that they can do a decent job when using machine-directed dialogs with multiple choices but are not quite ready to understand natural language spoken by a person.

We face similar difficulties with machine translation from foreign languages. I worked with multiple language translation programs that produced nonsense text filled with the right words.

WHY ARE COMPUTERS STUPID? WHAT IS MISSING?

Can tasks such as machine vision, speech recognition, and foreign language translation, which all seem very different, have a common solution?

The first common denominator is easy to find: all these tasks belong to the field of data interpretation. The next move is to find common steps for all three activities. What do people do when they are engaged in image or speech recognition, when they translate text from Hebrew to English? Why can't we build a program to perform similar steps?

The very first step is to recognize a business (social) domain area in which the data belong.